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Ancient Philosophy

Review Essays of Academic, Professional &
Technical Books in the Humanities &
Sciences

Plato

The Archaeology of the Soul: Platonic Readings in Ancient Poetry
and Philosophy by Seth Benardete, Ronna Burger and Michael Davis
(St. Augustine's Press)

The Archaeology of the Soul is a testimony to
the extraordinary scope of Seth Benardete's thought. Some essays
concern particular authors or texts; others range more broadly and
are thematic. Some deal explicitly with philosophy; others deal with
epic, lyric, and tragic poetry. Some of these authors are Greek,
some Roman, and still others are contemporaries writing about
antiquity. All of these essays, however, are informed by an
underlying vision, which is a reflection of Benardete's life-long
engagement with one thinker in particular – Plato. The Platonic
dialogue presented Benardete with the most vivid case of that
periagoge, or turn-around, that he found to be the sign of all
philosophic thinking and that is the signature as well of his own
interpretations not only of Plato but also of other thinkers.

The late Benardete (1930-2001), was an outstanding teacher and
scholar in classical literature and philosophy and taught at New
York University; editors are Ronna Burger, who teaches philosophy at
Tulane University and Michael Davis, who teaches philosophy at Sarah
Lawrence College.

The core of
The Archaeology of the Soul consists of a set of essays
Benardete produced in his last years; the collection provides at the
same time an entry into that world through some of Benardete’s
earliest articles on Plato and on Greek poetry. Benardete’s earlier
path of close textual analysis always reflected his intimate
philosophic dialogue with the thinker in whose work he was immersed;
later, he drew on resources of erudition acquired over a lifetime to
present a broader picture, on a theme like the dialectics of eros or
freedom and necessity.

In his late work Benardete was not only engaged in putting
together in more general form material he had worked out earlier; he
was still on the trail of new discoveries, above all, by extending
his Platonic understanding of philosophy to pre- and post-Platonic
thinkers. He had become increasingly aware that the discovery of
philosophy through the ‘Socratic turn’ was really the rediscovery of
an understanding already present in some form in the Greek poets and
that awareness guided his last years of study of the pre-Socratic
philosophers. According to the standard view of the history of Greek
philosophy, the Socratic turn, with its focus on ‘the human things,’
marks a point of radical change in philosophy’s history. Benardete’s
late studies led him to the conclusion that the kind of pivotal
reorientation thought to be Socratic is in fact the mark of what it
means to think philosophically, and Heraclitus or Parmenides is a
genuine philosophic thinker precisely to the extent that a Socratic
turn can be found in some form within his own thought.

At the same time that he was pursuing a track backward, from
Plato to the poets and pre-Socratic philosophers, Benardete was also
proceeding on a forward path, from Plato to the Latin writers, who
adopt the Platonic way of thinking with full understanding of what
it means to be ‘post-Platonic.’ As the essays collected in
The Archaeology of the Soul demonstrate, the Platonic notion of
a ‘second sailing’ gave Benardete a key to the relation between
Greek and Latin thought – and with that to a comprehensive
understanding of antiquity – as it did to the relation between
poetry and philosophy as such.

According to the preface,
The Archaeology of the Soul contains essays on eros, freedom,
and poetry in antiquity; on Hesiod, Pindar, Aeschylus and Sophocles;
on Heraclitus and Parmenides; on several Platonic dialogues and on
Aristotle. It contains as well essays on Horace, Vergil, Apuleius,
and Cicero; and on Jacques Derrida and Leo Strauss. Some essays
concern particular authors or texts; others range more broadly and
are thematic. Some deal explicitly with philosophy, others with
epic, lyric, and tragic poetry. Some of the authors are Greek, some
Roman, and still others are contemporaries writing about antiquity.

Given the independent origin of each of these essays and the
remarkable diversity they display, it is reasonable to ask whether
The Archaeology of the Soul constitutes a whole, and if so, what
the principle of its unity is. The title of this volume points to
that difficulty as well as to its resolution: the underlying vision
that informs all these essays is a reflection of Benardete's
life-long engagement with one thinker in particular – Plato. Only
because Plato seemed to him to come so close to the truth of things
could he hope to learn so much by unearthing Platonic resonances in
other thinkers – whether earlier or later, poetic or philosophic.
Accordingly, Benardete could make the startling claim that "What
philosophy is seems to be inseparable from the question of how to
read Plato." To read a Platonic dialogue one must attend to its
action, which "both explains the inadequacies of the argument and
deepens the argument." This relation between argument and action
reflects the linking of soul and logos. Plato's psychology is the
way to Plato's ideas. It was his deep understanding of this path
that led Benardete to discover an ‘archaeology of the human spirit’
in all the thinkers he studied.

Benardete's ongoing conversation with Plato is manifest in the
characteristic features of interpretation present throughout the
essays in
The Archaeology of the Soul. By calling readers’ attention to
neglected details that sit concealed on the surface of a text,
Benardete spurs observations that illuminate its central concerns.
The deceivingly superficial brings a text to light "in such a new
and yet convincing way that the reader is forced to experience
simultaneously a shock of surprise and a sense of recognition." The
Platonic dialogue presented Benardete with the most vivid case of
that periagoge, or turn-around, that he found to be the sign of all
philosophic thinking and that is the signature as well of his own
interpretations not only of Plato but also of other thinkers. If
Benardete's initial claims are frequently at odds with the
‘obvious,’ it is because such claims provide the occasion for a
periagoge in our thought. In following the movement produced by such
a turn-around – the action of the argument – Benardete articulates a
new argument, which, rather than reinforcing the explicit argument
of a text, undermines it in such a way as to compel one to rethink
things from the beginning. Benardete thus reproduces in his own
writing the ‘second sailing’ of the Platonic dialogues that requires
philosophic thinking to begin in error. In recognizing our error, we
learn that certain things cannot be seen at all without first having
been missed.

The core of
The Archaeology of the Soul consists of a set of essays written
after the previously published collection of Benardete's essays in
The Argument of the Action. It provides at the same time an entry,
through some of Benardete's earliest work, into the world of his
later thought, whose difficulty results in part from his sustained
reexamination of challenging texts over the course of many years,
building on earlier layers of understanding without repeating them.
The present volume makes available Benardete's first articles on the
dialogues to which he repeatedly returned – the Sophist, Statesman,
and Timaeus. Some particularly concrete and helpful keys to his
understanding of how to read Plato are to be found in a set of brief
articles, written near the start of his career, reprinted in
The Archaeology of the Soul. In "The Right, the True, and the
Beautiful," for example, he begins to uncover the philosophic
significance of the seemingly casual responses of Socrates'
interlocutors, by which they unwittingly add so much to the argument
of the dialogue. Benardete's early articles on Plato show the mark
of a gifted scholar; but they also indicate already what it means
for him to have found in Plato a measure of genuine thinking. He
holds others up to that standard, as in this collection when he
allows Derrida to reveal himself in his reading of the Phaedrus,
Strauss in his reading of the Republic.

The body of work Benardete produced in his last years is in
several ways strik­ingly new. His earlier path of close textual
analysis always reflected his intimate philosophic dialogue with the
thinker in whose work he was immersed; later, he drew on resources
of erudition acquired over a lifetime to present a broader picture.
This is especially evident in three pieces. In "Socrates and Plato:
The Dialectics of Eros," Benardete moves freely about the entire
Platonic corpus to indicate why "Eros is central to Plato in a way
that it is not for any other philosopher." In "Freedom: Grace and
Necessity" Benardete turns first to Livy and then to Thucydides,
Herodotus, Plato, Homer, the Greek tragedians, Tacitus, and Longinus
to enter into a meditation with them on the necessity of
self-opacity for human freedom. In "The Poet-Merchant and the
Stranger from the Sea" Benardete reflects on the way "the relation
between the local and the universal, between the law and the
transcendence of the law, which is at the heart of ancient poetry,
recurs in the element of philosophic reflection in Plato."

In his late work Benardete was not only engaged in putting
together in more general form material he had worked out earlier; he
was still on the trail of new discoveries, above all, by extending
his Platonic understanding of philosophy to pre- and post-Platonic
thinkers. From the beginning, Benardete was following the traces of
Platonic themes he discovered in Homer, Greek tragedy, and
Herodotus. Later this approach became more conspicuous, for example,
in the essay included in
The Archaeology of the Soul, "On Reading Pindar Platonically,"
or in the book he subtitled "A Platonic Reading of the Odyssey."
Benardete came to see that the discovery of philosophy through the
‘Socratic turn’ was really the rediscovery of an understanding
already present in some form in the Greek poets.

With this thought in mind Benardete turned in his last years to
the pre-Socratic philosophers. His final graduate seminars were
devoted to Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Plato's Parmenides. As he
always had in the past, Benardete sat down at the end of each
semester to write up the understanding he had developed in the
course, leaving readers with three brilliant essays, which undercut
the standard view of the history of Greek philosophy. According to
this view, the Socratic turn, with its focus on ‘the human things,’
marks a point of radical change in philosophy's history: it
transforms the prior stage of philosophic thought by turning inquiry
for the first time away from direct observation of the beings to
their indirect examination through the opinions or appearances that
come to light in speeches. Through his careful study of the
pre-Socratics, Benardete arrived at a different conception: the kind
of pivotal reorientation thought to be Socratic is in fact the mark
of what it means to think philosophically, and Heraclitus or
Parmenides is a genuine philosophic thinker precisely to the extent
that a Socratic turn can be found in some form within his own
thought.

At the same time that he was pursuing a track backward, from
Plato to the poets and pre-Socratic philosophers, Benardete was also
proceeding on a forward path, from Plato to the Latin writers, who
adopt the Platonic way of thinking with full understanding of what
it means to be ‘post-Platonic.’ Benardete was not so much interested
in these thinkers as Platonic epigones – he was no stranger to the
philosophical difficulties of various historical ‘Platonisms.’ He
developed instead a series of intriguing and illuminating analyses
of Horace, Cicero, Vergil, and Apuleius with a view to uncovering
the self-understanding these authors have of themselves as Platonic
thinkers who were not present at the beginning, who could,
therefore, never be for Rome what Homer was for Greece. Vergil means
readers to understand him in light of Homer. Not only Cicero's Laws
but also Apuleius's Metamorphoses is self-consciously modeled on
Plato's Phaedrus. As Benardete's readings indicate, Latin authors,
given their historical situation, are particularly well-placed to
understand the degree to which all genuine thinking is rethinking.

The Platonic notion of a ‘second sailing’ thus gave Benardete a
key to the relation between Greek and Latin thought and with that to
a comprehensive un­derstanding of antiquity – as it did to the
relation between poetry and philosophy as such. Taken individually
and bound together as a whole, the essays in
The Archaeology of the Soul map that understanding, which
Benardete developed, with Plato as a guide, over a lifetime of
philosophic reflection on the human soul.

New Perspectives on Plato, Modern and Ancient edited by Julia Annas,
Christopher J. Rowe (Harvard University Press) The seven essays in this
collection are based upon the August 1999 Colloquium at the Center for Hellenic
Studies, Washington , D.C. , entitled "Plato and Socrates: Approaches to the
Interpretation of the Platonic Dialogues." Ostensively the Colloquium was
designed as a collaborative investigation into the significance of two
particular changes that have occurred in the field of Platonic studies. The
first is the rapidly increasing breakdown of the long-accepted paradigm for
interpreting Plato along developmental schemes that rests on a broad division
of the dialogues into "early" (and "Socratic"), "middle," and "late." There is
growing disaffection with many of the assumptions that sustained this paradigm,
such as, for example, the ability to isolate a "Socratic" phase of Plato's
thought, or the usefulness of the chronology of composition to establish the
development of that thought. Indeed, the whole idea of a developmental
interpretation of Plato's ideas has perhaps lost much of its allure, not least
in view of increased attention to ancient interpretations of Plato that do not
invoke development. But while the established paradigm-which, of course, many
have always resisted-is losing its hold, no generally accepted alternative has
emerged to replace it. Rather, the reverse: any disinterested observer,
surveying current books and periodical articles on Plato, might easily gain an
overwhelming impression of fragmentation--even if the survey restricted itself
to publications in English. (There have long been significant differences,
within the modern period, between the types of approach to Plato adopted within
different cultural traditions, whether in English-speaking counries, in Europe
at large, or in Latin America; the present tendency toward "fragmentation," if
such it is, is a new phenomenon, belonging chiefly to those areas in which
English is the first language.)

The second major change which
lay behind the original idea for the Colloquium was the gradual emergence of a
new debate between philosophers and classicists about the relationship between
form and argument in the Platonic corpus. This debate is informed to some degree
by currents in modern literary theory, which have helped to produce an increased
sensitivity to the problems and possibilities of interpreting the highly complex
and elusive set of texts contained in the Platonic`corpus. But it too
increasingly recognizes the relevance of ancient approaches to Plato (and to
Socrates) and their potential usefulness to modern interpreters, especially in
offering perspectives and preoccupations different from our own.

Seven speakers were invited to
address some aspect of these problems. Each invited presentation also had a
respondent who presented critical comments and context to the remarks of the
principle speaker. After presentation and a recording of comments from the floor
the essays were reworked and reordered for presentation in this volume.:

Julia Annass (with Dorothea
Frede responding) investigation of how should we categorize the "middle" and
"late" periods, acts as an introduction to the essays. Middle period in the
Platonic corpus used to mean "optimistic," "constructive," while "late" meant
"critical"; but that seems to depend too heavily on a particular reading of
Parmenides. Certainly, some dialogues must have been written "in the middle,"
between those written earlier and those written later, but that by itself
obviously carries no implication for our interpretation of them. Have we
perhaps gone on using categories whose justification has actually been
forgotten, and indeed lost?

Next David Sedley (with David
Blank responding) comments on the Ancient Platonic perspectives on Socratic
irony. Academic skepticism, Middle and NeoPlatonism all contribute to images
Socratic irony which contracts significantly with modern philosophical
interpretations.. What do these ancient interpreters have to offer us, if
anything? One position that is widely held, at least by implication, is that
anything which makes Plato look less like a modern academic philosopher will
simply make him look less like a philosopher. If, then, we are (modern)
philosophers, we had better go on interpreting him as one-and ignoring the
Neo-Platonists, at any rate, whose Plato is often about as far from the model of
a modern philosopher as it is possible to be. Is there anywhere to go beyond
this position? Is it inevitable that we reject later Platonist interpretation,
or does such interpretation, however alien it may seem to be, have something of
value for us?

Christopher Taylor (with Brad
Inwood responding) comments upon the modern origins of our present paradigms. At
what point, and precisely why, did "Socrates" begin to be separated off from
"Plato" in the interpretation of Plato? (In one sense, perhaps, with Aristotle;
but the particular notion that one group of dialogues is essentially Socratic is
a modern one. Who invented it, and why?) When did scholars of Plato first begin
systematically to detect, or assume, a difference between "middle" and "late"?

Charles Kahns (with Charles
Griswold. Jr. responding) offers a summary of Platonic chronology. What are the
grounds for supposing that knowing when a particular dialogue was written (if we
could know it), whether absolutely or in relation to other dialogues, should
significantly affect our understanding of it? Kahn provides an adroit reading
of the historical approaches that have given us the developmental perspective.

Christopher Gill (with Kathryn
Morgan responding) looks at the dialogue form and the nature of dialectics. Is
there any such thing as "the" dialogue form? Discussion has usually centered on
the "Socratic" dialogues, treating the rest as a kind of falling-off from the
real thing-the real dialogue; but is Laws, for example, written as it is-as a
conversation-merely, as it were, out of habit? Do we have anything to learn from
ancient reactions to Plato as a literary artist?

Terry Penner (with Christopher
Rowe responding examines the philosophical implications of "Socratic" dialogues
How distinct are they from the "middle" and "late" ones? Some reconstructions of
the "Socratic" positions allegedly contained in these dialogues suggest that
they are more or less interestingly different; on the other hand, different
forms of unitarianism do not seem obviously silly, and there are some
indications that Plato thinks the methods we see deployed in the "Socratic"
dialogues are compatible with those deployed in the "middle" and "late" period.
Is the notion of "Socratic" dialogues ultimately tenable or useful?

Andrea Nightingale (with R.B.
Rutherford responding) examines fantastic and realistic mimesis in Plato as a
demonstration of a literary approach to Reading. Exactly what does a
self-consciously literary approach to Plato have to offer, if anything, toward
an understanding of the dialogues as literary works? (Clearly, form has some
bearing on the central issues-or does it? The "Socratic" dialogues differ in
form from most of the others; or is this merely a matter of artistic/writerly
choice?)

Taken together the volume
shows that the nature of Platonic studies is vigorous if no longer unified by
scholarly consensus about the over-all shape or order of the corpus. Given the
plethora of methodologies in use still working out their various filters on this
complex set of texts, it may be several generations before any such unitive
frame is like to cycle round again.

Plato
the Man and His Work: The Man and His Work by A. E. Taylor (Dover Books
on Western Philosophy: Dover) In order to read Plato with some facility it is
almost imperative to read a commentary a long with the Dialogues. A.E. Taylor is
a true guide to what Plato actually says and provides useful classical context
that will keep out the most egregious error. This is an essential volume in any
philosophers library.

One of the greatest thinkers of the ancient world, Plato
instigated groundbreaking inquiries into morality, ethics, and the quest for happiness
that continue to inform and influence philosophical discussion today. In this
outstanding work of scholarship, a renowned expert on Plato presents a
scrupulously accurate historical view of the great philosopher's life and works.
Distinguished by its dispassionate scholarly analysis, Professor Taylor's
discourse is refreshingly free of the biases that have frequently tainted other
studies.

A brief introductory chapter acquaints readers with the
known events of Plato's life. The author then proceeds to an illuminating
examination of the philosopher's voluminous writings, including the minor
Socratic dialogues, as well as such major works as Phaedo, Symposium,
Protagoras, Republic, Phaedrus, Timaeus, Laws, and other influential dialogues.
The final chapter, "Plato in the Academy," attempts to pin
down‑with the help of some of Plato's former students, such as Aristotle
the philosopher's beliefs about numbers. In a substantial appendix, "The
Platonic Apocrypha," Professor Taylor examines writings that have sometimes
been attributed to Plato, including several letters, and offers cogent reasons
for accepting or rejecting them as Plato's work.

Praised by Dean William R. Inge of Theology as "a
great book, an honour to . . . British scholarship," this volume is an
invaluable guide for students, teachers, and other readers interested in
philosophy.

Plato
(Hardcover, one volume edition) edited and introduced by Gail Fine, Professor of
Philosophy at Cornell University, brings together some of the most important recent
articles on central topics in Plato's philosophy from the last three decades. This is a
one-volume version of two paperback volumes in the Oxford Readings in Philosophy series: Plato 1:
Metaphysics and Epistemology (paperback); and Plato 2: Ethics,
Politics, Religion, and the Soul (paperback). It includes all the articles and
Introductions found in these two volumes, but the separate bibliographies have been
combined into one. The aim of the composite volume, as of the individual volumes, is to
introduce the reader to just some of the important dialogues and issues, with the hope the
interested reader will be encouraged to pursue the study of Plato further. Divided into
two parts, the first part looks at metaphysics and epistemology. It includes essays on
Socratic method, Socrates' disavowal of knowledge, the theory of forms, knowledge and
belief, being and not being, and the philosophy of language. The second part deals with
ethics, politics, religion, and the soul. It includes essays on virtue, knowledge, and
happiness; justice and happiness; pleasure; Platonic love; feminism; the ideally just
state, democracy and totalitarianism; and the nature of the soul and moral motivation.

In keeping with the aims of the Oxford Readings in Philosophy series, all the
selections are relatively recent: the earliest appeared in 1970. Several of the essays
have been specially revised for this collection and an introductory essay precedes each
part by the editor, which sets the articles in a broader context and guides the reader
through the intricacies of the subject while acknowledging lacuna in the selection of
arguments.

Having the articles available in a single volume should prove useful, as they are
often interestingly related to one another. This reflects the fact that areas of
philosophy that are now often studied in relative independence of one another are viewed
by Plato as being importantly connected. For example, he takes failure in the elenchus---his
method of cross-examining interlocutors---to indicate not only a failure of knowledge but
also a moral failure. He takes the notion of goodness to be central not only to ethics and
politics but also to metaphysics and epistemology. His metaphysical and epistemological
views, as well as his views of human psychology, ground many of his ethical and political
views. Indeed, one might speak of the metaphysical, epistemological, and psychological
bases of his ethical and political views.

Since this volume is not comprehensive, the Introductions fill in some gaps; hence
they discuss some issues to which no article neatly corresponds. They also situate the
articles within a broader context. However, space limitations obviously preclude a full
and thorough discussion. Footnotes make suggestions for further reading, as does the
Bibliography.

Though most of the articles are previously published, some of them have been
revised-sometimes in minor, sometimes in major, ways-for inclusion in these volumes. The
work is an intermediate introduction to current discussions of Plato in contemporary
Angelo-American philosophical discourse.

The volumes is not quite a fair introduction to Platos works themselves but
rather an introduction to the philosophical use of his ideas by Angelo-American scholars.

Plato
and Platonism: Plato's Conception of Appearance and Reality in Ontology,
Epistemology, and Ethics, and Its Modern Echoes by Julius Moravcsik (Issues
in Ancient Philosophy: Blackwell) provides a scheme to reach a conception of
reality that places that realm outside the temporal and spatial, creating a
translation of Platonic conception into contemporary formulations, which shows
both the stark contrast and the perennial relevance of the philosopher and his
inquiries and especially his explanatory strategies. In Plato
and Platonismwe are invited look at Plato's way of achieving a
"quantum jump." The story of forging explanatory patterns goes
further. Aristotle, at what one might call the fourth stage, attempts a
unification. Stage-two explanations involve roughly what he came to view as the
constitutive factor (material cause); stage one was refined to be the agential
factor (efficient cause); and stage three was reworked to become the structural
and functional factors (formal and final causes) in his analysis of the natures
of kinds.

Suggesting that the explanations under consideration
primarily concern kinds and their natures. At stage three this focus undergoes
considerable change. The concern with qualitative sameness and difference in
relation to whatever mathematical, geometrical, and other order-producing
structures Plato thought to have discovered. Thus what matters is the extent to
which proportion and equality have roles in specifying the structures of
relatively stable elements in nature, regardless of whether they belong to
specific biological kinds or not. Thus the notion of α natural kind, while
central to Aristotle, does not play a key role in the Platonic explanatory mold.

Explanations need an explanans; hence if we view
these explanatory chains within α metaphysical system, either we face an
infinite regress or some elements need to be viewed as self-explanatory. For
Plato these self-explanatory elements turn out to be the Forms. Thus we need to
try to understand what it is about the Forms that led Plato to view them in this
way.

So far we have discussed only metaphysics. But Plato's
forging of the new explanatory mold in his metaphysics affected also
dramatically his epistemology and ethics. Given the third explanatory structure,
with its two stages, the epistemology must focus on the insight and
understanding that are involved in our attaining adequate representations of
systems of abstract entities such as those we encounter in mathematical or
geometrical proofs or the abstract models of α science like physics. Plato
wants us to project onto the large canvas of metaphysics the exhilaration we all
feel when we finally understand what is possibly just α simple mathematical
proof and to strive to attain the same sense of discovery when eventually we
understand what the Forms are and how they are interrelated. As we shall see,
explicating this is the primary task of Platonic epistemology, rather than
sketching the structure of proρositional knowledge and information
processing.

The ethics, too, reflects the Platonic division between
reality and appearances. It centers on finding an adequate ideal for life. This
involves an appropriate overall aim, α character that goes with pursuing
such an aim or goal, and the resulting happy discovery that in being that kind
of α human one can find meaning in life. The appropriate aims and goals, as
well as the appropriate character structures as Plato sees these, are described
- as we shall see - in terms of our relations to what for Plato is the real and
fundamental and our disdain for that which for Plato belongs merely to the world
of appearances.

Moravcsiks ultimate aim in this book is to sketch this Platonic
explanatory scheme, which, with its impacts on epistemology and ethics, was
revolutionary for its time, both in its historical context and so as to bring
out its implications for the problems and conceptual arsenal of today.

Images of Persons Unseen: Platos Metaphors for the
Gods and the Soul by E.E. Pender (Academia Verlag) In recent years metaphor has received much critical
attention leading to important new insights in various literary and scientific
disciplines. This book presents the first comprehensive study of Platonic
imagery written in the light of modern approaches to metaphor. Through close
analysis of Platonic texts the author seeks both to advance interpretation of
the dialogues and to promote understanding of the cognitive functions of
metaphor and imagery - aspects of language long dismissed as merely
ornamental. Three emerging positions on metaphor's capacities - the epistemic,
illustrative and emotive theses - are applied to Plato's metaphors for the gods
and the soul and it is concluded that, while some of these metaphors play an
illustrative role, others become an integral and irreplaceable element in
Platonic theory.

Elizabeth`Pender is Lecturer in Classics at the University of Leeds. She was
a British Academy Post-doctoral Research Fellow (1992-95), and has taught at the
University of Durham, and King's College and Royal Holloway, University of
London. Her PhD thesis, on which this book is based, was awarded the 1993
Hellenic Foundation prize for the best UK doctoral thesis in Greek Studies
(Classical Literature and Philosophy).

Plato's
Symposiumby
Plato, translated by Seth Benardete, Commentary by Allan Bloom (University of
Chicago Press) Plato, Allan Bloom wrote, is "the most erotic of
philosophers," and his Symposium is one of the greatest works ever
written on the nature of love. This new edition brings together the English
translation by renowned Plato scholar and translator Seth Benardete with two
illuminating commentaries: Benardete's "On Plato's Symposium" and
Allan Bloom's provocative essay "The Ladder of Love." In the
Symposium, Plato recounts a drinking party following an evening meal, with
guests including the poet Aristophanes, the drunken Alcibiades, and, of course,
the wise Socrates. The revelers give their views on the timeless topics of love
and desire, all the while addressing many of the major themes of Platonic
philosophy: the relationship of philosophy and poetry, the good, and the
beautiful. Benardete's translation of the Symposium is meticulously
faithful and gracefully invitational; it enables every Greek‑less reader
to encounter Plato's art and thought in all its charm, power, and mystification.
Bloom's patient attention to the text results in some brilliant readings. He is
especially good in ferreting out the extraordinary riches of the Symposium. The
commentary was previously published in Blooms essays about friendship.

On Ideas
: Aristotle's Criticism of Plato's Theory of Forms is Fines previous work on
this central theme in platonic studies. Her contribution is a closely reasoned and
textually grounded reading with a bow to the rhetorical ambiguity that requires
generations of scholars to constantly rethink these issues.

Most interpretations of Plato follow two courses: the most ancient is doctrinal, where
Plato's dialogues offer a definitive picture of the universe. This view dominated
Neoplatonism down to the beginnings of the 1700s.

The modern course is to read Plato with Socratic skepticism. Most readings of Plato
have leaned in one of these two directions. In this text we are offered a variety of
nonskeptical, nondogmatic approaches to Plato.

We are offered some rhetorical readings of the philosopher as well as dramatic and
poetic attempts to reinvent the originating Platonic voice. The essays are very accessible
and offer important ways to broach the meanings in Plato without being deluged with
historical baggage.

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Last modified:
January 24, 2016